Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Its all about entropy

In today's lecture I discussed ideal solutions and osmotic pressure. This illustrates the surprising fact that the thermodynamics of dilute solutions is dominated by entropic effects and much of the conceptual formalism of mixing of ideal gases can be carried over, even though the interaction of the solute with the solvent molecules may be highly non-trivial.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Emergence and protein folding

Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...